Crossing the Implicit Barrier
The Use of Stage and Auditorium Space in Arja Koriseva’s Anniversary Concert
Yrjö Heinonen, senior lecturer in Musicology at the University of Turku
Introduction
There has been much discussion about the live character of contemporary live concerts, particularly when it comes to popular music. The “liveness” (Auslander 1999) of a live concert is said to depend on the immediacy of the performance: the audience shares the same physical space and time frame with the performer (Shuker 1994, 198). Researchers like Andrew Goodwin (2004) and Philip Auslander (1999) have claimed that contemporary live events are hardly live anymore – at least in the traditional sense of the word – because they are heavily mediated by electronically or digitally programmed sound and lighting systems. This question is also relevant with respect to Arja Koriseva’s tour celebrating her 15th anniversary as a performing artist, which is what I will be discussing in this paper.
Arja Koriseva, born in 1965, is one of the most popular Finnish female singers, but her popularity is based on live performances rather than on record sales. She began performing in central Finland in 1978 and was crowned Tango Queen in the Seinäjoki Tango Festival in 1989. Since then, she has issued 15 studio albums and eight “Best of” collections. She was the Finnish voice for Disney’s Pocahontas (1995) and Pocahontas 2 (1998). She has made numerous appearances on national television, including two of her own TV shows (2000, 2002-2003). She has starred in seven stage musicals, including the roles of Eliza in My Fair Lady (2000) and Maria in The Sound of Music (2005-2006, 2008). Her repertoire comprises Anglo-American and Continental evergreens, Finnish pop hit tunes (iskelmä, “Finnish Schlager”), Finnish and international tangos, sacred music, and Christmas carols. Iskelmä is an umbrella-like term for various Finnish genres, styles and forms of light entertainment and dance music (Mäkelä 2007, 54). Sacred music and Christmas carols excluded, the program for Koriseva’s anniversary tour reflected quite well her overall repertoire.
Arja Koriseva’s anniversary tour was a “productized” concert tour. This means that during the tour, she performed at a restricted number of venues with the same set (the same songs in the same order). Moreover, the staging design – set construction, costumes, lighting, sound, and so forth – remained basically the same in all of the concerts, even though it had to be adapted to fit the requirements of each venue. In spite of this productization, it is justified to speak about “liveness” with respect to Arja Koriseva’s stage performances during the tour.
Performer/Audience Separation: Implied Barrier and Single Focus
In the theatre and concert hall there has traditionally been an implicit contract which separates the performer from the audience. In theatre, this separation has been architecturally institutionalized by a ramp or proscenium (Finter 1994, 161). In many concert halls there is a platform that acts like a ramp. Even if there is no proscenium or platform – which is the case in many concert halls and multi-purpose venues – there appears to be an implied barrier between the staged action and the audience. In the latter case, there may be and often is “some suggestion of a line of demarcation, as a railing or a break in floor elevation” (Bowman 1964, 221).
Another institutionalized feature of traditional theatre is that there is a single focal point around which everything else on stage is organized (Schechner 1968, 50). As for concert halls, it has been the norm that the vocalist, the main soloist or the conductor of a symphony orchestra is located at the visual and auditory focal point (Figure 1). This focal point is front and centre stage, not backstage or in the wings – and definitely not among the audience (Tagg 1994, 54). This kind of practice has been particularly strong in classical music, for example in symphony concerts (Small 1987, 1990) and classical song recitals (Schneider 1994, 2-11), but – although to a lesser degree (and with no obligation to stay front and centre stage) – it has been strong in popular song concerts as well.
Figure 1. Stage-audience separation and focal point (Tagg 1994).
Breaking up the Barrier and Liberating the Focus
Crossing or breaking up the barrier between performers and audience, as well as moving towards a flexible or variable focus, has not been uncommon since the avant-garde performance art movement of the 1960s – neither in theatre nor in the concert hall. Table 1 summarizes some basic differences between traditional theatre and performance art, as presented in Richard Schechner’s (1968) six axioms for environmental theatre.
| TRADITIONAL | PERFORMANCE ART | |
| Artist-audience relationship | One-sided: artists active, audience passive | Interactional: both artists and audience participate |
| Use of space | Explicit or implicit barrier: stage/auditorium separation | All space used for performers, all space used for audience |
| Stage | Fixed, picture-frame proscenium | Anything: totally transformed space or “found” space |
| Focus | Single focus | Flexible and variable focus: single, local, multiple |
| Production elements | Dependent: all elements support the performance | May be independent: each may speak its own language |
| Text | Pre-existing text (script) | No need for pre-existing text |
Table 1. Differences between traditional theatre and performance art (Schechner 1968).
During the last three decades or so, many innovations of the performance art movement have been absorbed into the mainstream. On the one hand, commercial theatre has increasingly adopted ideas and techniques from avant-garde performance art. On the other hand, the performance art movement itself has drawn on various – often older – traditions of popular staging (Nelson 1989, 72-73, 93; Aronson 2000: 205, 211). These include practices from European and American popular musical theatre: the variety show, vaudeville, revue and – in particular – the cabaret. A typical cabaret consists of a small stage and a relatively small audience sitting around tables. The performer plays directly to his or her audience, keeping direct eye-to-eye contact with the spectators, and it is not uncommon for him or her to walk singing through the audience or even sit down at a table for a while. All this breaks down the illusory fourth wall of traditional picture-frame proscenium theatre (Appignanesi 2004, 6; Jelavich 1996, 2). It is worth noting, as pointed out by Bernard Gendron (2002, 16), that there have always been interactions and border crossings between the “artistic” cabaret, avant-garde and popular music (jazz, popular song, rock). Given this background, a contemporary popular song concert can be expected to combine ideas, techniques and features from classical song recital, performance art, a rock concert and popular musical theatre.
Research Design
In the following section, I will explore the ways in which Arja Koriseva plays with, questions and crosses the implicit barrier between stage and audience in her live performances. Related to this, I will also pay attention to the focus – whether single or flexible and variable. A flexible focus may involve a single focus, but, with respect to avant-garde performance art, Schechner (1968, 56-58) introduces two other kinds of focus: multi-focus and local-focus. In multi-focus, more than one event takes place at the same time, distributed throughout the space. In local focus, events are staged so that only a fraction of the audience can see and hear them. Local-focus allows, for example, real body contact and whispered communication between the performer and the spectator. Local focus may also be used as part of multi-focus. My exploration is based on fieldwork done during Arja Koriseva’s aforementioned national anniversary tour in 2004. The fieldwork took place in co-operation with Arja Koriseva and the members of the accompanying band, all of them being aware of the study and the intention to publish its results in the form of one or more scholarly articles. All of the examples provided here come from the concert in Jyväskylä Paviljonki, which I videotaped, and are based on a close reading of the videos.
Use of the Stage and Auditorium Space at the Jyväskylä Paviljonki Concert
Jyväskylä Paviljonki is a large congress and fair trade centre in the city of Jyväskylä, in Central Finland. Its auditorium, seating 1200, is frequently used for large-scale concerts and other entertainment events. In the auditorium, there is no platform or other architectural means to raise the stage above the floor level. Therefore, the separation between the performers and the audience is implicit rather than real or physical. However, the stage is covered by a carpet and the edge of the carpet acts as a line of demarcation between the stage and other spaces. Moreover, during Arja Koriseva’s anniversary concert, a plant stand placed at the front of the stage acted as a kind of railing.
The stage map – that is to say, the physical positions of the musicians on stage – is quite conventional. In a traditional setting, the accompanying musicians often form a visual and sonic semicircle around the vocalist or soloist, who is the focal point in a one-way projection of sound from this semicircle to the auditorium. Figure 2 shows the stage map and also indicates certain basic route choices Arja (A) uses and when she moves onstage. The line-up of the accompanying Juhla-Fortuna Orchestra was as follows (numbers 1-7 refer to their positions on stage; see Figure 2):
- Heikki “Hexa” Elo: keyboards, vocals & backing vocals
- Reijo “Takku” Ylinen: brass (trumpet, Flugelhorn), woodwinds (flute, soprano saxophone, tenor saxophone), guitars
- Anna-Liisa Väkeväinen: accordion, keyboards, backing vocals (on a small platform)
- Anssi Nykänen: drums (on a small platform)
- Pertti “Pertsa” Jalonen: bass, vocals & backing vocals
- Saku Mattila: guitars
- Matti Rantatalo: keyboards
In addition to Arja and the accompanying musicians, a dancing group called Figaro participated in the opening number, as well as in three consecutive numbers, both in the first and the second part of the concert.
Figure 2. Stage map and Arja’s basic route choices during the Jyväskylä concert.
As the star of the show, Arja is definitely the focal point, but she definitely refuses to stay front and centre stage. Instead, she uses most of the stage space, often playing with or questioning the barrier between the stage and the audience. Moving close to, stopping at or crossing the barrier often results in local-focus, wherein she performs before and primarily to a certain fraction of the audience.
Taking the Stage
The opening number of the second part of the concert, a Finnish tango called “Rannalla” (“On the Shore”), is a good example of the way Arja takes the stage during a performance (Figure 3). The performance begins with the band playing the intro in the dark (1). Arja enters from backstage (stage up right) and the following spotlight picks her up at the moment she begins to sing (2). She moves diagonally across the stage (3) to stage down left, where she stops to sing to the right section of the audience (4). From there, she walks across the stage past the down centre position (5) to the stage down right position and stops to sing to the left section of the audience (6). Towards the end of the performance, she returns to centre stage (7) to receive the applause (8).
Figure 3. Taking the stage during the performance of “Rannalla” (“On the Shore”). Published by kind permission of Arja Koriseva Oy.
Crossing the Barrier
The performance of a Continental pop hit tune “Nuori tumma” (“Zigeunerjunge”) offers an example of Arja crossing the implied barrier (Figure 4). After the intro, Arja begins to sing and moves from centre stage (1) to the stage down left position, but crosses the demarcation line formed by the edge of the carpet and enters into the no-man’s land between the stage and the audience. Eventually, she stops to sing to the right section of the audience (2). Staying in the no-man’s land, she moves first in front of the centre section of the audience (3) and then in front of the left section of the audience (4). Arja’s adventures offstage leave the stage for the dancers, resulting in a multiple focus: the audience may now choose whether to follow Arja moving offstage or the dancers dancing onstage. Towards the end of the performance, Arja returns onstage, moving back and forth between the stage down right position (5), centre stage (6) and the stage down left position (7), until she eventually ends the performance at centre stage (8).
Figure 4. Crossing the barrier during the performance of “Nuori tumma” (“Zigeunerjunge”). Published by kind permission of Arja Koriseva Oy.
Taking the Auditorium
In performing “Tuulen värit” (“Colors of the Wind” from Disney’s Pocahontas), Arja takes full advantage of the auditorium space. The performance opens “normally”, with the band playing the intro in the dark. The follow spot picks Arja at the moment she begins to sing at the stage up centre position (1). During the verse, she walks across centre stage to the front of floor on the right and stops to sing to that portion of the audience (2). She then runs up the right aisle (3), singing and shaking hands with some audience members, and ends by singing to the right side of the balcony (4). From there, she runs in front of my video camera (5) and stops to sing to the left side of the balcony (6). During the bridge, she walks down the left aisle and stops to sing to those sitting near the centre of the floor (7). After this, she continues walking and ends up singing to those sitting on the left side of the floor (8). During the coda, she returns to centre stage to receive the applause.
Figure 5. Arja’s route through the auditorium during the performance of “Tuulen värit” (“Colors of the Wind”).
Figure 6. Taking the auditorium during the performance of “Tuulen värit” (“Colors of the Wind”).
Conclusion
Arja Koriseva’s stage performance contains elements from both the “traditional” approach (based on stage-audience separation) and the “performance art” approach (as explicated in Schechner 1968). Basically, the relation between artist and audience is one-sided. Arja is singing to the audience and the audience is watching and listening to her. With respect to the use of space, all of the space is usable for Arja, but not for the audience. The show takes place at a given venue, but is adapted according to specific requirements concerning, for example, staging, lighting, the sound system and the performer-audience relationship. The focus is, in principle, flexible: most of the time single-focus prevails, but at times there is also local-focus or even multiple-focus. All of the production elements contribute to the overall message of the performance, even though one might add that the visuals – Arja’s costume, jewels and hair-do, lighting – speak their own language as well. The show is based on a script written by Arja with the help of her assistant, Milla Mattila.
The Finnish popular song is quite a conservative genre. However, contemporary performers like Arja Koriseva show that this conservative genre is capable of renewing itself by absorbing practices from the avant-garde performance art movement and the ever-changing rock scene. There is also a close connection with popular musical theatre, particularly with the “integrated” revue and cabaret. An integrated revue differs from a variety show in that it attempts to provide unity and cohesiveness for the show as a whole by creating links between individual numbers (Mueller 1984, 37-38; Kirby 1995, 5). In Arja Koriseva’s concert, this “unity and cohesiveness” results largely in the way the concert and the entire tour is productized – that is, in the pre-written script and in the way all of the production elements contribute to the overall message of the performance. In addition, Arja’s performance also comprises features from cabaret aesthetics (Jelavich 1996, Gendron 2002, Appignanesi 2004). In particular, the intimate relationship and interaction between Arja and her audience (crossing the implied barrier, local focus, taking the auditorium), which is characteristic of cabaret, breaks down the performer-audience separation institutionalized both in the illusory fourth wall of traditional picture-frame prosecenium theatre and in the single focus – located at front and centre stage – of the conventional concert practice.
To summarize, Arja Koriseva appears to incorporate features from popular musical theatre, avant-garde performance art and rock aesthetics into more traditional performance practices rooted in Western theatre and concert institutions. Playing with, questioning and crossing the architecturally institutionalized or implicit barrier between stage and audience can also be seen as one indication of the reportedly strong sense of presence – “aura” (Benjamin 2001, 50) or “charisma” (Copeland 1990, 33) – in her performances and, consequently, for her popularity as a performing artist.
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